Internet Commerce in the Information Systems Curriculum

This session centers upon curriculum development in the emerging e-commerce area. The design and development of an e-commerce masters degree will be discussed. Panel topics include the demand for Internet Commerce courses and programs, partnering with industry, resources required, and program and course content. In addition, ideas for less extensive and less technical e-commerce programs will be discussed, along with the role of e-commerce in the undergraduate curriculum. Suggestions for blending e-commerce into existing IS curricula will be considered

Managing the consistency of distributed documents

Many businesses produce documents as part of their daily activities: software engineers produce requirements specifications, design models, source code, build scripts and more; business analysts produce glossaries, use cases, organisation charts, and domain ontology models; service providers and retailers produce catalogues, customer data, purchase orders, invoices and web pages. What these examples have in common is that the content of documents is often semantically related: source code should be consistent with the design model, a domain ontology may refer to employees in an organisation chart, and invoices to customers should be consistent with stored customer data and purchase orders. As businesses grow and documents are added, it becomes difficult to manually track and check the increasingly complex relationships between documents. The problem is compounded by current trends towards distributed working, either over the Internet or over a global corporate network in large organisations. This adds complexity as related information is not only scattered over a number of documents, but the documents themselves are distributed across multiple physical locations. This thesis addresses the problem of managing the consistency of distributed and possibly heterogeneous documents. “Documents” is used here as an abstract term, and does not necessarily refer to a human readable textual representation. We use the word to stand for a file or data source holding structured information, like a database table, or some source of semi-structured information, like a file of comma-separated values or a document represented in a hypertext markup language like XML [Bray et al., 2000]. Document heterogeneity comes into play when data with similar semantics is represented in different ways: for example, a design model may store a class as a rectangle in a diagram whereas a source code file will embed it as a textual string; and an invoice may contain an invoice identifier that is composed of a customer name and date, both of which may be recorded and managed separately. Consistency management in this setting encompasses a number of steps. Firstly, checks must be executed in order to determine the consistency status of documents. Documents are inconsistent if their internal elements hold values that do not meet the properties expected in the application domain or if there are conflicts between the values of elements in multiple documents. The results of a consistency check have to be accumulated and reported back to the user. And finally, the user may choose to change the documents to bring them into a consistent state. The current generation of tools and techniques is not always sufficiently equipped to deal with this problem. Consistency checking is mostly tightly integrated or hardcoded into tools, leading to problems with extensibility with respect to new types of documents. Many tools do not support checks of distributed data, insisting instead on accumulating everything in a centralized repository. This may not always be possible, due to organisational or time constraints, and can represent excessive overhead if the only purpose of integration is to improve data consistency rather than deriving any additional benefit. This thesis investigates the theoretical background and practical support necessary to support consistency management of distributed documents. It makes a number of contributions to the state of the art, and the overall approach is validated in significant case studies that provide evidence of its practicality and usefulness

Exploration and Research on the Hybrid Model Curriculum Reform under the Collaboration of School and Enterprise

Under the guidance of the new professional talent cultivation plan, relying on the “JSP Program Design” to construct a teaching mode, this paper has completed the exploration and research of mixed mode curriculum reform under the cooperation of school and enterprise. In the reform, various forms of interactive teaching are introduced into the classroom, fully mobilizing students’ autonomy and initiative, and reflecting the student-centered teaching spirit. At the same time, carry out activities to bring projects into the classroom, utilize open laboratory platforms, introduce industry experts, and transfer the job responsibilities of enterprises to experimental teaching, cultivating students’ abilities in four aspects: professional foundation application, thinking logic analysis, team collaboration, and innovation and entrepreneurship. The practical results indicate that the reformed curriculum model has strong applicability, significantly improving students’ learning enthusiasm, and significantly enhancing their practical application ability. The teaching reform model has the necessity of further promotion

Interactive Web Portal Application for Ambalta School for Children with Autism

Abalta is a school, based in Galway, designed to educate children who suffer from autism. The school was borne out of the identified need for children with autism to get a specific focused education. In July, 2001, four sets of parents came together, using their own personal funds, to establish the school and had it up and running by September, 2001. It took months of hard work, political negotiating, and lobbying, culminating with a high court case to attain funding from the state. In today\u27s Internet-oriented world, a web application is essential for businesses, organiiations and individuals to optimiie their impact on the world: to reach more people, be more efficient, learn more and achieve their goals. As Abalta School is ever expanding, there is an extensive need for a web portal for the school. A web portal will provide the school with a means of sharing information on autism and answering questions that people may have. Currently, when a person requires information, they contact the school and the school principle is the person who answers questions. The principle can spend at any one time, up to an hour answering questions on the telephone, sending brochures to people and explaining the methodologies used by the school. Having a web portal would enable the staff and employees of Abalta to save time and effort by directing people to the web portal where questions can be answered and sought-after information can be found

SOA without SOAP: overview of service­-oriented architecture technologies, with emphasis on SOAP

Käesoleva bakalaureusetöö põhiline eesmärk on süsteemselt üles loetleda teenustele orienteeritud arhitektuuri (SOA) vanade ja uute implementatsioonide tugevused ja nõrkused, asetades rõhu SOAP’ile. Selle täitmiseks on võrdlusesse valitud neli tehnoloogiat, mis mängisid olulist rolli SOA tehnoloogiate kasutuselevõtus.The main goal of this thesis is to systematically identify the advantages and weaknesses in older and newer implementations of service oriented architecture (SOA), putting emphasis on the ones related to SOAP. In order to fulfill this goal, four technologies were chosen for comparison, which played a significant role in adopting SOA

Experiences of teaching UML within the information systems curriculum

The Unified Modelling Language (UML) has been a standard modelling language for the development of software intensive systems since 2000. As a consequence, the information systems (IS) curriculum, at the Cavendish School of Computer Science, University of Westminster in London, had UML teaching incorporated two years ago. We have encouraged the introduction to and use of UML in modules that replaced traditional approaches to IS development. In this paper we report on experiences of using UML within the two modules of our undergraduate curriculum, delivered by the IS department. The first module is taught in the second year, i.e. at level 5, and delivers requirements analysis with UML. The second module uses the UML for modelling and designing distributed business applications and is taught in the final year, at level 6. In both modules it is assumed that an introduction to modelling in IS, with the syntax and semantics of a selection of UML modelling elements and diagrams, has been done earlier. We single out some problems and give a rationale for changes in the next academic yea

Qualitative Evaluation of the Java Intelligent Tutoring System

In an effort to support the growing trend of the Java programming language and to promote web-based personalized education, the Java Intelligent Tutoring System (JITS) was designed and developed. This tutoring system is unique in a number of ways. Most Intelligent Tutoring Systems require the teacher to author problems with corresponding solutions. JITS, on the other hand, requires the teacher to only supply the problem and problem specification. JITS is designed to “intelligently” examine the student’s submitted code and determines appropriate feedback based on a number of factors such as JITS’ cognitive model of the student, the student’s skill level, and problem details. JITS is intended to be used by beginner programming students in their first year of College or University. This paper discusses the important aspects of the design and development of JITS, the qualitative methods and procedures, and findings. Research was conducted at the Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, Ontario, Canada

Jahresbericht Forschung und Entwicklung 2006

Forschungsjahresbericht 2006 der Hochschule Konstanz Technik, Wirtschaft und Gestaltun

Jahresbericht Forschung und Entwicklung 2005

Forschungsjahresbericht 2005 der Fachhochschule Konstan